IBM InfoSphere Streams V3.0 delivers a wide range of new features and functions designed to improve usability and simplify application development. A new common application deployment, with rich UI, accelerates development time, helps gather run-time insights, and allows for easy expansion into the big data platform. Drag-and-drop application composition allows for intuitive, faster, easier programming and development. Data visualization allows users to see what their data looks like by providing the standard ability to easily route all streaming records to a single operator and display them in a variety of ways on a dashboard. With InfoSphere Streams, you get enhanced support for complex data types, such as XML, that allows developers to fuse a broader range of traditional and nontraditional data.

The Message Queuing adapter allows InfoSphere Streams to handle an even broader variety of data, by communicating with other systems using this messaging standard. A complex event processing operator simplifies development of complex event processing applications.

A new adapter, that interfaces with IBM InfoSphere Information Server and IBM InfoSphere DataStage , allows users to provide better governance of their streaming data and related applications.

Enhancements in connection health monitoring and logging mean less downtime for users.

Five new accelerators enhance the ability to manage the volume, velocity, and variety of data. These accelerators provide new analytic operators or sample applications that can be used as design templates for new applications.

Time Series Accelerator has over 20 operators and includes many machine learning algorithms that help to perform predictive analytics, regressions, smoothing, filtering and transformation on time series data. Time series data is data that arrives periodically from things like sensors or stock market trades, which continuously provides data.

Geospatial Accelerator calculates distance with many techniques and map matching functions to enable users to determine if a point is within a given area.

IBM Accelerator for Telecommunications Event Data Analytics provides a full application for transformation and analytics for telephone company call and event detail records, used for applications such as revenue assurance or fraud detection in real time.

IBM Accelerator for Social Data Analytics provides the ability to analyze various types of social media data to provide key insights around consumer sentiment and purchase intent. This information can then be leveraged to build applications around lead generation and brand management.

IBM Accelerator for Machine Data Analytics provides the ability to analyze various types of machine data to provide business insights. It provides ability to ingest, parse, and extract machine data. It can then analyze the data to provide insights such as patterns and correlations. It provides faceted search capability to easily find and navigate through large volumes of machine data. It also provides for visualization of the data and the results of the analysis.

IBM Accelerator for Telecommunications Event Data Analytics is a template that enables real-time processing and analytics of Call Detail Records and Event Detail Records using IBM InfoSphere Streams. The template is a collection of assets that must be configured for a specific use case, such as:

An evolution of an asset that you may have already installed using the template

Including a demonstration application, which is a configuration of the template with a set of example rules

Helping you accelerate application development, with ability for you and partners to create derivative work

Customization may be required for specific customer deployments, including writing or changing SPL code, C++ code, or scripts. Customization may include changes to input files, containing sets of CDRs IPDRs, Event Detailed Records (referred to as xDRs), generated by switches, networking equipment, or external systems. Customization may include changes to functions in the template, such as:

Business dashboards - Real-time dashboards can be customized to show different metrics.

Reporting - Reports may be customized.

Finally, customization may be done for output, such as changing the external xDR repository.

New Accelerator for Social Data Analytics enables monitoring of internet social media.

The Social Data Accelerator, extracts relevant information from Tweets, Boards, and Blogs, and builds your social profiles based on a specific use case and industry. Standard analysis on Buzz, Sentiment, Intent to Buy, Intent to Attend, Customer Of, Ownership is provided in context of the social profile dimensions,such as gender, location, parental status, marital status, product interest, employment.

New Accelerator for Machine Data Analytics simplifies development of geospatial applications.

New Accelerator for Geospatial Data Analytics

The Geospatial Data Analytics Accelerator will provide ability to interpret location data (for example GPS data) and display on a map. It also provides geofencing, the ability to see if a location exists in or around the vicinity and area of interest. This accelerator can be used in conjunction with city maps to point various moving traffic points as long as they are transmitting GPS data.

New Accelerator for Time Series Data Analytics improves decision making with cognitive and predictive analytics.

The Accelerator for Time Series Data Analytics has been used many years as a research asset in healthcare applications, scientific applications, and transportation applications. The new Time Series accelerator Data Analytics provides a number of statistical and predictive analytic operators to speed development of analytic applications.

Operators include:

Windowing: Weighting or tapering of a time series given a specified duration (functions include Hamming, Hanning, Blackman, Cosine, and Triangle)

CrossCorrelate: Estimating the degree to which two time series are correlated.

Convolve is a mathematical operation similar to correlation that produces a third time series

Integration of InfoSphere DataStage and InfoSphere Streams applications involves flowing data streams between the applications and configuring them to use the data.

By sending data to InfoSphere Streams from IBM InfoSphere DataStage , InfoSphere Streams can perform near real-time analytic processing in parallel to the data being loaded into a warehouse by IBM InfoSphere DataStage . Alternatively, when sending data from InfoSphere Streams to IBM InfoSphere DataStage , the InfoSphere Streams job performs real-time analytic processing, and then forwards the data to IBM InfoSphere DataStage to enrich, transform, and store the details for archival and lineage purposes.

AQL specifies rules for extracting information from text documents. Other IBM products, such as IBM InfoSphere BigInsights , also support AQL queries. AQL can be compiled into an Annotation Operator Graph file (AOG file) (.aog file), which is an internal representation of the operator graph that is used by the text analytics engine to annotate the document at run time.

Financial Accelerator continues to provide benefits such as faster time to value, better performance, and greater simplicity for applications used in Financial Services. The Financial Accelerator includes:

A set of industry-specific adapters, each implemented as an InfoSphere Streams Processing Language operator, that allow InfoSphere Streams applications to interoperate with many generic financial services infrastructure and external protocols.

Bidirectional connectivity between InfoSphere Streams applications and Financial Information eXchange (FIX) version 4 gateways for order execution, confirmation, and other tasks performed through the FIX protocol.

Bidirectional connectivity between InfoSphere Streams applications and the WebSphere® Front Office platform, including support for its Reliable Multicast Messaging option for consumption of market data feeds, use of order books, and access to other functions provided by WebSphere Front Office.

A set of built-in functions and analytics that are routinely used for typical trading applications in the financial services domain. They are:

InfoSphere Streams Processing Language operators who help integrate InfoSphere Streams applications with QuantLib - a popular open-source financial analytics package. The InfoSphere Streams operators provide access to two QuantLib engines that compute valuations for European-style and American-style Equity Options from within an InfoSphere Streams application.

A set of library functions accessible from InfoSphere Streams Processing Language that help calculate a set of equity option derivative values known as The Greeks, such as delta, theta, rho, vega, gamma, vanna, zomma, and charm.

A set of library functions that help calculate theoretical put-and-call option values based on Black-Scholes options valuation model. These functions further demonstrate how customer-proprietary analytic functions, outside of InfoSphere Streams environment, can be accessed from a InfoSphere Streams application.

The Financial Services Accelerator that also includes two starter applications to illustrate how InfoSphere Streams can be used to develop powerful proprietary applications for two popular High-Frequency Trading (HFT) scenarios namely Equities Trading and Options Trading. Each application is designed to be a starting point, providing a more easily extensible model or template for further customization based on proprietary analytics.

Accessibility by people with disabilities

A US Section 508 Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) can be requested via the IBM website

Supports customization of display attributes such as color, contrast, and font size

Communicates all information independently of color

Provides documentation in an accessible format

Allows the user to access the interfaces without inducing seizures due to photosensitivity

Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act

IBM InfoSphere Streams is capable as of December 14, 2012, when used in accordance with IBM's associated documentation, of satisfying the applicable requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, provided that any assistive technology used with the product properly interoperates with it. A US Section 508 Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), containing details on the products accessibility compliance, can be requested on the following website

IBM InfoSphere Streams offers an ultra-high performance-in-motion analytics platform for the real-time analytic processing market. Real time analytic processing is an extension of the online analytic processing (OLAP) market by doing analysis on data in motion instead of on data at rest to provide higher volume and lower latency analysis. It represents a new evolution in the business intelligence market characterized by incredible throughput rates of disparate types of structured and unstructured information that must be processed with millisecond or microsecond latencies using complex correlations and powerful analytics.

A key difference between InfoSphere Streams and other business intelligence offerings, such as OLAP, is that the latter requires data to be at rest before running analytics. However, InfoSphere Streams analyzes data in-motion -- a faster process, since it does not need to be stored on disk. This can lead to ultra-low latencies as compared to existing technologies.

InfoSphere Streams also allows persisting subsets of data or complete data as business demands. In addition, while OLAP offerings are traditionally limited to supporting only structured data, InfoSphere Streams technology can support both structured and unstructured data. While being radically different from existing business intelligence solutions, InfoSphere Streams can efficiently extend and add synergy to existing Business Intelligence offerings. For example, InfoSphere Streams can reuse and continually refine existing analytics expressed in Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) standards.

The real-time analytic market overlaps with the Complex Event Processing marketplace. InfoSphere Streams extends this market by providing the capability to read in and process much higher discrete event throughput rates and continuous streams of information, such as audio feeds from hydrophones or video feeds from television with ultra-low latencies. Furthermore, InfoSphere Streams also provides the incremental capabilities to process unstructured data such as audio, video, text, and EKG.

The Publications Center is a worldwide central repository for IBM product publications and marketing material with a catalog of 70,000 items. Extensive search facilities are provided. Payment options for orders are via credit card (in the U.S.) or customer number for 20 countries. A large number of publications are available online in various file formats, and they can all be downloaded by all countries.

Specified operating environment

Hardware requirements

2 GB memory to run simple applications, such as the Commodity Purchasing Sample Application that is included with InfoSphere Streams

Software requirements

Red Hat Enterprise Linux V5.3, or later, or V6.0, or later

CentOS Linux V6.0, or later

The program's specifications and specified operating environment information may be found in documentation accompanying the program, if available, such as a readme file, or other information published by IBM , such as an announcement letter. Documentation and other program content may be supplied only in the English language.

Compatibility

InfoSphere Streams V3.0 is compatible with applications that were developed for use on InfoSphere Streams V2.0.

Performance considerations

Performance of InfoSphere Streams applications is dependent on many things, including, but not limited to:

Application design

Analytic complexity

Server hardware, including number of cores, CPU speed, and memory size

Server cluster communications bandwidth

Number of InfoSphere Streams jobs running simultaneously

InfoSphere Streams V3.0, using quadcore x86 3.0 GHz machines in a cluster, an application with simple analytics, and WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging using InfiniBand (IB), with 256-byte tuples, achieved a throughput of over one million tuples with just two machines instead of using six machines as in V1.0.

Any performance data contained herein was determined in a controlled environment. Therefore, the results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. Some measurements may have been made on development-level systems and there is no guarantee that these measurements will be the same on generally available systems. Furthermore, some measurements may have been estimated through extrapolation. Actual results may vary. Users of this document should verify the applicable data for their specific environment.

Planning information

Customer responsibilities

Successful application operation and management of InfoSphere Streams is the responsibility of the user. Examples of those responsibilities include:

Confirming the validity of the proposed equipment and programs

Developing appropriate system procedures

Incorporating protective measures to safeguard the privacy of data from unauthorized modification, destruction, or disclosure

Software Subscription and Support (also referred to as Software Maintenance) is included with licenses purchased through Passport Advantage and Passport Advantage Express® . Product upgrades and technical support are provided by the Software Subscription and Support (also referred to as Software Maintenance) offering as described in the Agreements. Product upgrades provide the latest versions and releases to entitled software, and technical support provides voice and electronic access to IBM support organizations, worldwide.

IBM includes one year of Software Subscription and Support (also referred to as Software Maintenance) with each program license acquired. The initial period of Software Subscription and Support (also referred to as Software Maintenance) can be extended by the purchase of a renewal option, if available.

Authorized User is a unit of measure by which the program can be licensed. An Authorized User is a unique person who is given access to the program. The program may be installed on any number of computers or servers and each Authorized User may have simultaneous access to any number of instances of the program at one time. Licensee must obtain separate, dedicated entitlements for each Authorized User accessing the program in any manner directly or indirectly (for example, via a multiplexing program, device, or application server) through any means. An entitlement for an Authorized User is unique to that Authorized User an may not be shared, nor may it be reassigned other than for the permanent transfer of the Authorized User entitlement to another person.

Note: Some programs may be licensed where devices are considered users. In that case, the following applies. Any computing device that requests the execution of or receives for execution a set of commands, procedures, or applications from the program or that is otherwise managed by the program is considered a separate user of the program and requires an entitlement as if that device were a person.

Resource Value Unit (RVU)

RVU is the unit of measure by which this program is licensed. RVU entitlements are based on the quantity of a specific designated measurement for the given program. A Proof of Entitlement (PoE) must be obtained for the appropriate number of RVUs required for your environment as defined by the specific program terms. The RVU entitlements are specific to the program and may include, but are not limited to the following: Client Devices, data source records, messages, and servers, and may not be exchanged, interchanged, or aggregated with RVU entitlements of another program. To understand these benefits of RVU licensing, and to determine how many RVUs to obtain for the program, contact your IBM representative.

Withdrawal of previous Passport Advantage part numbers

Effective November 16, 2012, IBM will withdraw from marketing the following products licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement. A replacement product and availability date is listed if one is available.

Orders for these part numbers will not be accepted after the stated effective date of withdrawal, nor will normal marketing activities or educational support be available unless previous agreement exists between the customer and IBM .

The information provided in this announcement letter is for reference and convenience purposes only. The terms and conditions that govern any transaction with IBM are contained in the applicable contract documents such as the IBM International Program License Agreement, IBM International Passport Advantage Agreement, and the IBM Agreement for Acquisition of Software Maintenance.

Licensing

IBM International Program License Agreement including the License Information document and PoE govern your use of the program. PoEs are required for all authorized use.

Part number products only, offered outside of Passport Advantage , where applicable, are license only and do not include Software Maintenance.

This software license includes Software Subscription and Support (also referred to as Software Maintenance).

Limited warranty applies

Yes

Limited warranty

IBM warrants that when the program is used in the specified operating environment, it will conform to its specifications. The warranty applies only to the unmodified portion of the program. IBM does not warrant uninterrupted or error-free operation of the program or that IBM will correct all program defects. You are responsible for the results obtained from the use of the program.

IBM provides you with access to IBM databases containing information on known program defects, defect corrections, restrictions, and bypasses at no additional charge. For further information, consult the IBM Software Support Handbook found at

IBM will maintain this information for at least one year after the original licensee acquires the program (warranty period).

Program technical support

Technical support of a program product version or release will be available for a minimum of five years from the general availability date, as long as your Software Maintenance is in effect. This technical support allows you to obtain assistance (via telephone or electronic means) from IBM for product-specific, task-oriented questions regarding the installation and operation of the program product. Software Maintenance also provides you with access to updates (modifications or fixes), releases, and versions of the program. You will be notified, via announcement letter, of discontinuance of support with 12 months' notice. If you require additional technical support from IBM , including an extension of support beyond the discontinuance date, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner. This extension may be available for a fee.

Money-back guarantee

For clarification, note that if for any reason you are dissatisfied with the program and you are the original licensee, you may obtain a refund of the amount you paid for it, if within 30 days of your invoice date you return the program and its PoE to the party from whom you obtained it. If you downloaded the program, you may contact the party from whom you acquired it for instructions on how to obtain the refund.

For clarification, note that for programs acquired under the IBM International Passport Advantage Agreement, this term applies only to your first acquisition of the program.

Usage restriction

International Passport Agreement

Software Subscription and Support applies

Yes. Software Subscription and Support is included with licenses purchased through Passport Advantage and Passport Advantage Express . Product upgrades and technical support are provided by the Software Subscription and Support offering as described in the Agreements. Product upgrades provide the latest versions and releases to entitled software and Technical Support provides voice and electronic access to IBM support organizations, worldwide.

IBM includes one year of Software Subscription and Support with each program license acquired. The initial period of Software Subscription and Support can be extended by the purchase of a renewal option, if available.

While your Software Subscription and Support is in effect, IBM provides you assistance for your routine, short duration installation and usage (how-to) questions, and code-related questions. IBM provides assistance via telephone and, if available, electronic access, to your information systems (IS) technical support personnel during the normal business hours (published prime shift hours) of your IBM support center. (This assistance is not available to your end users.) IBM provides Severity 1 assistance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For additional details, consult your IBM Software Support Handbook at

Software Subscription and Support does not include assistance for the design and development of applications, your use of programs in other than their specified operating environment, or failures caused by products for which IBM is not responsible under the applicable agreements.

For additional information about the International Passport Advantage Agreement and the IBM International Passport Advantage Express Agreement, visit the Passport Advantage website at

Other terms

System i Software Maintenance applies

No

Educational allowance available

Not applicable.

Statement of good security practices

IT system security involves protecting systems and information through prevention, detection, and response to improper access from within and outside your enterprise. Improper access can result in information being altered destroyed or misappropriated or can result in misuse of your systems to attack others. Without a comprehensive approach to security, no IT system or product should be considered completely secure and no single product or security measure can be completely effective in preventing improper access. IBM systems and products are designed to be part of a comprehensive security approach, which will necessarily involve additional operational procedures, and may require other systems, products, or services to be most effective. IBM does not warrant that systems and products are immune from the malicious or illegal conduct of any party.

IBM has transformed its delivery of hardware and software support services to help you achieve higher system availability. Electronic Services is a web-enabled solution that offers an exclusive, no-additional-charge enhancement to the service and support available for IBM servers. These services are designed to provide the opportunity for greater system availability with faster problem resolution and preemptive monitoring. Electronic Services comprises two separate, but complementary, elements: Electronic Services news page and Electronic Services Agent.

The Electronic Services news page is a single Internet entry point that replaces the multiple entry points traditionally used to access IBM Internet services and support. The news page enables you to gain easier access to IBM resources for assistance in resolving technical problems.

The Electronic Service Agent is no-additional-charge software that resides on your server. It monitors events and transmits system inventory information to IBM on a periodic, client-defined timetable. The Electronic Service Agent automatically reports hardware problems to IBM . Early knowledge about potential problems enables IBM to deliver proactive service that may result in higher system availability and performance. In addition, information collected through the Service Agent is made available to IBM service support representatives when they help answer your questions or diagnose problems. Installation and use of IBM Electronic Service Agent for problem reporting enables IBM to provide better support and service for your IBM server.

For Passport Advantage information and charges, contact your IBM representative or authorized IBM Business Partner, or authorized IBM Business Partner for Software ValueNet® , if applicable. Additional information is also available at

If you are an IBM Business Partner -- Distributor for Workstation Software acquiring products from IBM , you may link to Passport Advantage Online for resellers where you can obtain Business Partner pricing information. An IBM ID and password are required.

The Americas Call Centers, our national direct marketing organization, can add your name to the mailing list for catalogs of IBM products.

Note: Shipments will begin after the planned availability date.

Trademarks

BigInsights and Electronic Service Agent are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

IBM, InfoSphere, DataStage, WebSphere, Passport Advantage, Express, DB2, ValueNet and ibm.com are registered trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.

Other company, product, and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

Terms of use

IBM products and services which are announced and available in your country can be ordered under the applicable standard agreements, terms, conditions, and prices in effect at the time. IBM reserves the right to modify or withdraw this announcement at any time without notice. This announcement is provided for your information only. Additional terms of use are located at